‘This is baseball country’: MLB season gets underway in Japan as national hero Shohei Ohtani inspires Dodgers’ win over Cubs

By Hanako Montgomery and George Ramsay, CNN

(CNN) — Baseball fever swept through Tokyo on Tuesday as the MLB season got underway, offering fans a rare opportunity to glimpse homegrown star Shohei Ohtani in action.

Thousands of supporters gathered at the Tokyo Dome to see reigning World Series champions, the Los Angeles Dodgers, face the Chicago Cubs, two teams with five Japanese players between them.

The biggest draw, of course, was three-time MVP Ohtani, who enjoyed a record-breaking campaign last year with 54 home runs and 59 stolen bases in the regular season.

The anticipation rose inside the stadium each time Ohtani stepped up to the plate during the Dodgers’ 4-1 win, and perhaps the loudest moment came when he got his team’s first hit of the season in the fifth inning.

The four-time All-Star also hit a double in the ninth inning, becoming the third Japanese player to have multiple hits in an MLB game at the Tokyo Dome, according to the league.

“I was actually pretty nervous,” Ohtani told MLB Network after the game. “It’s been a while since I’ve been nervous but today I definitely felt it. It’s a very unique environment, a unique situation where I do feel that the fans are expecting me to get some hits. That was a little bit different.”

Ohtani wasn’t the only Japanese player to attract attention from fans. Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto threw five innings, giving up one run and striking out four.

Los Angeles was without Freddie Freeman, who was scratched from the starting lineup late with a rib injury, and Mookie Betts, who is out of action due to illness.

This was the first of a two-game series between the teams, both of whom have been playing well-attended exhibition games in Tokyo against Japanese teams prior to MLB Opening Day.

About five hours before the start of Tuesday’s game, thousands of people had already gathered outside the Tokyo Dome, many of them sporting Dodgers uniforms. Here, baseball fandom has only grown amid Ohtani’s stardom.

“In Japan, they’re maniacally focused on baseball,” David Leiner, president of trading cards at Topps, told CNN. “This is a baseball country. Soccer, football, there’s interest – we work with the local J-League here as well on the soccer side – but baseball dominates.

“So when you look at the fandom and you look at the team fandom and the player fandom, I would just say it’s on a whole other level here.”

It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that the MLB decided to host its opening game of the season in Tokyo, which saw the league’s first overseas game in 2000.

This was the sixth time that the MLB’s regular-season opener has been staged in Japan, while South Korea became the fifth country outside of the US and Canada to host the first game of the season last year.

For Leiner and Topps, games in Japan represent a huge business opportunity, a chance to capitalize on the country’s enormous appetite for baseball.

“You go to the sites, you go to the Tokyo Dome or the Miyashita Park sale sites where Topps and Fanatics are selling product, there have been lines of thousands of people,” he said about the Japanese public’s enthusiasm ahead of the Tokyo Series.

“The demand for our product is crazy … Every single day our trading cards sell out extremely fast, even though we limit them to one box per person and we have some small limits. They sell out really, really fast.

“We will have no product by the end of the Tokyo Series. It’ll be all completely sold out, and then next time we will make more and get more product out to folks. But it’s exciting to see and exceeded all expectations.”

Although Japan has had its own league, Nippon Professional Baseball, for decades, some fans are more taken by seeing homegrown stars shine in the US.

Hideo Nomo, the National League Rookie of the Year and an All-Star in 1995, opened the door for more Japanese players to join MLB around 30 years ago, and in Ohtani, Japan has produced a two-way star and one of the greatest baseball players ever seen.

The 30-year-old’s history-making season with the Dodgers last year has only reinforced his status as a national icon in Japan.

“You can’t say anything negative about Ohtani,” Japanese baseball expert Robert Whiting recently told CNN. “The guy’s just spectacular. He hits 500-foot home runs and throws the ball a hundred miles an hour!”

He added: “Somebody like Ohtani comes along – and his Dodgers games are televised in Japan – everybody’s glued to the television set at nine o’clock in the morning to watch the game.”

The Dodgers and the Cubs face each other in Tokyo again on Wednesday before regular-season action resumes on March 27, at which point the new MLB season will be well and truly up and running.

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CNN’s Jamie Barton contributed to reporting.